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Case Study · Custom Commerce & AI
Billy Fender Custom Guitars
Forty years of craft, AI-powered commerce.
A ground-up rebuild for a Florida-based custom guitar maker. Migrated from WordPress onto Laravel + Vue on a dedicated database — faster, leaner, fully custom — with an integrated AI sales assistant, a structured buyback pipeline, and AI-powered staff workflows end to end.
The challenge
WordPress was the bottleneck
Billy's been building custom guitars for four decades. The catalog is niche, the builds are bespoke, and the customers know exactly what they want — or they need to talk to someone who does. The old WordPress site was fine when it was a portfolio. But with a growing collection store, an active buyback pipeline, and a catalog that needed real product semantics, it was breaking at every seam: slow pages, brittle plugins, clunky inventory, and a WooCommerce checkout that made high-ticket buyers nervous.
The ask wasn't "make WordPress faster." It was: rebuild this from scratch on a stack that fits the business, and design around the two things that actually move revenue — the sales conversation and the buyback pipeline.
What we built
Laravel + Vue, AI baked in
Custom Laravel backend
Built on Laravel with a dedicated database purpose-built for custom-build commerce. No WooCommerce bloat, no plugin conflicts. Every data model maps to something real in the business.
Vue storefront for collection pieces
A custom Vue frontend for the available-collection catalog — fast, filterable, photography-forward. Product detail pages treat each guitar as a build story, not a SKU.
AI sales assistant, customer-facing
An AI assistant trained on Billy's catalog, build philosophy, and spec language. Answers product questions in real time, guides buyers to the right instrument, and hands off to a human when the conversation warrants it.
Custom build inquiry flow
A structured form that walks a potential buyer through the build decisions — wood choices, pickup configuration, finish, neck profile — so what lands in Billy's inbox is ready to quote, not a three-line email asking "can you build me something."
AI-powered buyback pipeline
A structured guitar-buyback intake with AI-assisted valuation prompts, condition capture, and offer routing. Staff workflows for listing management, offer processing, and follow-up are AI-assisted end to end.
Performance + SEO, tuned tight
Core Web Vitals optimized throughout — images properly sized and lazy-loaded, code-split JS, caching strategy tuned. Full on-page SEO, Product and Article schema where it fits, canonical hygiene, structured data for collection pieces.
The stack
What's under the hood
Backend
Laravel + PostgreSQL, dedicated database, Redis for queues and cache.
Frontend
Vue 3 SPA, Tailwind CSS, Inertia for the admin-side workflows.
AI layer
Customer-facing sales assistant + AI-assisted staff workflows for listings, offers, follow-ups.
Infra
Fully managed infrastructure operated by us. Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, and security.
The outcome
The site now runs the business
The storefront loads fast, the catalog is filterable and discoverable, and the AI assistant shoulders the high-volume product questions that used to consume hours. The buyback pipeline went from email threads and spreadsheets to a structured system that Billy and his team can actually stay on top of.
Under partnership, we operate the infrastructure, handle care, push content and SEO updates, and iterate on the AI layer as the catalog evolves. Billy builds guitars. We run the platform.